In 2019 Tony Tulathimutte published The Feminist, a short story that went about as viral as any short story could, becoming the most read fiction piece in the literary magazine n+1’s 20-year history, and sending certain corners of Twitter into a frenzy. The eponymous protagonist describes himself on his online dating profile as “unshakably serious about consent”. He doesn’t understand why, despite his impeccable feminist credentials, he keeps getting friend-zoned while men much uglier and less evolved than him get laid. In middle age, he joins online forums such as Narrow Shoulders/Open Minds, where he rages that his chronic sexlessness represents “a mass abrogation of the social contract by legions of treacherous, evasive, giggling yeastbuckets”. Finally validated, his resentment becomes murderous.
Like all of Tulathimutte’s recent fiction, the story is extremely dark, mordantly, laugh-out-loud funny, and somewhat morally and politically ambiguous. He received many private messages from readers seeking a “gold bullion guarantee” that their reading of the story was correct – are you supposed to sympathise with the feminist? But Tulathimutte doesn’t like to answer such questions. “I want to be able to complicate any sort of reading that would reduce my work to something banal or ideological,” he tells me.
